A monarchy is like a man-of-warbad shots between wind and water hurt it exceedingly; there is danger of capsizing. But democracy is a raft. You cannot easily overturn it. It is a wet place, but it is a pretty safe one.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.

It is a fact and no fancy that we have all lived to see the abolition of slavery. Why is it incredible that some of us may live to see a greater evil, namely, the liquor traffic, made an outlaw by both state and national constitutional enactment? There is more money behind the liquor traffic than was ever behind slavery. Those who used to be called by Charles Sumner the Lords of the Lash never worked, or whipped, or burned, or starved to death in any circuit of the seasons before the Civil War so many victims as the liquor traffic now destroys every year in our republic. Slavery never added so much to the wastes and burdens of the nation in any one year before our military conflict began, as the liquor traffic now adds every year. Slavery never cost us a thousand millions annually. Slavery never destroyed eighty thousand lives a year. Slavery did not produce nine-tenths of the crime of the land. It is on account of the unity of the liquor traffic and its growing audacity that I predict its overthrow.

The natural language of gesture is Gods language. We did not invent it. Surely natural language is the language of nature; and these gestures which make us hang the head, and give us the erect attitude, are proclamations made, not by the will of man, but by the will of that Power which has co-ordinated all things, and given them harmony with each other, and never causes an instinct to utter a lie.

What is the average type of a counterfeit church? A hammock, attached on one side to the cross, and, on the other, held and swung to and fro by the forefinger of Mammon; its freight of nominal Christians elegantly moaning meanwhile over the evils of the times, and not at ease unless fanned by eloquence and music, and sprinkled by social adulations into perfumed, unheroic slumber.